The RNC Shoots Itself in the Foot (Again)

Philip Diehl explains how the RNC’s own rule changes are coming back to haunt them in this election:

The last thing the Republican National Committee wanted was a drawn-out battle for the nomination. That’s why the RNC attempted to design the 2016 primary rules to favor an establishment candidate. Of course, the 2016 presidential race has been anything but favorable to establishment candidates: The dynamics of the race point squarely to an anti-establishment candidate securing the nomination. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz now have a near-insurmountable advantage in the race, one that will almost certainly leave the establishment candidates finished by early March.

The RNC has a great talent for fighting the last war. Each cycle they do their best to remedy whatever they perceived to be a major flaw with the last primary season, and they end up with an outcome they hate even more than the last one. In 2008, McCain won quickly against a divided field. He had the nomination effectively sewn up by Super Tuesday (February 5 that year), and Romney’s withdrawal from the race later that same week guaranteed that McCain would win. Because McCain was a nominee many Republicans didn’t want, the RNC set out to prevent the same quick success of a front-running candidate. To that end, they spread out the primaries and fought against “front-loading” the calendar in 2012, and they moved away from winner-take-all rules in some places. That gave them a drawn-out fight between Romney and his rivals that they concluded lasted far too long. Because they assumed that this hurt the eventual nominee and damaged the party with the endless series of primary debates, they went back to a system that was supposed to give a front-runner a better chance to wrap things up sooner. Unfortunately for them, this year party leaders loathe the top two candidates to differing degrees and would prefer that neither of them wins, but the RNC arranged things so that it will be very difficult for any of the other candidates to stop them both.

Some states have what Diehl calls “winner-takes-most” rules that set up a threshold for winning delegates. If a candidate reaches 15 or 20%, he gets his share, but if he falls short of that he gets nothing. The trouble for the “establishment” candidates is that none of them is consistently polling well enough to meet the threshold in most places. Diehl gives an example:

Georgia, a winners-take-most state with a 20 percent threshold, illustrates the formidable obstacles the establishment candidates face. A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted in mid-January shows the outsiders taking 76 percent of the vote while the four insiders combined take just 19 percent. Rubio leads the insiders with 13 percent, trailing Trump by 26 points. Only Trump, with 39 percent, and Cruz, with 29 percent, would qualify for delegates, splitting the state’s 76 delegates between them. So far, none of the establishment candidates are close to meeting Georgia’s 20 percent threshold.

The Georgia scenario will play out in six states holding primaries on March 1, otherwise known as the SEC Primary.

Of course, things could change between now and March 1, but the point is that Rubio or any other “establishment” candidate can’t afford to hang around for months finishing in third place again and again in the hopes of winning at some later date. If the GOP had a purely proportional system for awarding delegates that might not be such a terrible plan, but it doesn’t. As Diehl points out the Southern states that vote on March 1 account for 422 delegates apportioned by the same rules, and he observes that they “are conservative states in which establishment candidates will likely struggle to meet the thresholds. The Republican nomination contest is rigged to favor the strongest candidates, and until something changes dramatically that means the system is rigged to favor Trump and Cruz.

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6 Responses to The RNC Shoots Itself in the Foot (Again)

The graphic artist who gave us the image of the GOPs symbolic animal next to a guillotine put another round in the party’s foot. Is she/he not aware that the Republican Governor of Maine just endorsed (or “joked” about) the use of that instrument in capital punishment cases?

The GOP Establishment is totally in disorder. Republicans in the past prided themselves on how orderly and disciplined they were. The GOP base has revolted and the Establishment has no idea what to do. They can’t even rig the game any more. After eight years of Obama, the GOP should be able to stroll into the White House, but given their talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, that may not happen.

It is ironic that the RNC adopted rules that assumed a leading GOPe candidate ~ not imagining that all of them taken together would likely be scoring less than 20%

The possibility is that the best analysts in the world failed to notice that Romney, who’d run in over 30 different primaries in several election cycles, was barely able to make 20% even when he had no serious opposition!

Then, when he had no opposition whatsoever, he faced very small primary turnouts of less than 20% of the Republican normal base.

Why should the GOP be able to “walk in after 8-years of Obama?” Is there some, “It’s MY Turn Clause” I’m unaware of??

Obama was handed the worst hand of any President since Reagan, and a hand that was not inherited so much as created by his prior successor.

Never forget Dubya left office with an approval rate in the 20s, and baring gerrymandering and voter suppression in the elections since, the party has yet to recover from the decidedly UN-conservative reign of George W. Bush.

The net result being the GOP has a well-earned hostility to ANYTHING that might help the average Joe, but never seems to want the Military Industrial Complex to embrace “rugged individualism.”

After eight years of Obama, the GOP should be able to stroll into the White House

That’s ridiculous. Obama’s been underwhelming and disappointing in almost every way, but for most people conditions are (slightly) better than they were at the beginning of this term. He isn’t leaving multiple gratuitous calamities in his wake, as his predecessor did.

As Mr. Larison has pointed out many times, the Republican Party is the party of Bush. Republicans have put a lot of effort into erasing the 2001-2008 from their memories. (That’s a big part of why their “message” is so often weirdly out of step with reality in 2016.) Unfortunately, outside of the doublethink zone, people do remember those years, and who was responsible.

I talked to somebody who switched from being Democrat to Republican. Her issues were — crippling debt, bad wars, not-entitlement social security being looted, and Obamacare creating more debt (but she didn’t complain about Medicare, she was 70).

Just like it is said that the consequences of Reagan’s non-conservative policies were attributed to George Bush senior, now here is a Democrat attributing all of Republican’s or at least bi-partisan sin to only Obama.

I have often lamented about cluelessness and unthinkingness affecting the Republican voters, may be all voters are affected.

So much have been written about Trump and Cruz or the maneuvering of the primaries to get a favorable outcome for the party establishment. Does truth and fair play not matter anymore?

Several very nice and all seemingly intelligent people I knew had expressed their support for Trump based on the fact that “he will bring the change we need!” I am much more concerned these voters couldn’t see just one step ahead and ask what this change is. Trump and Cruz are just two people. The people who support them and think like them are in the millions! I should think the latter is more serious.

Whatever “leaders” we get, we deserve them exactly, by voting for them and by abdicating our duty to not vote against them. The democrats who stayed home from the mid term of 2010 deserve the chaos that we see on the Republican side.